Isn’t it ironic that the Jewish women who were victims get their faces erased, but the Nazi men with guns are left untouched? Of all people, you’d think Jews would be most sensitive to the importance of preserving the horrors of recent history…but I guess it only matters if it happened to men.

Someone’s confused. You can’t get cooties from pictures, not even from iconic ones. And besides, the cooties aren’t only on the face. Just being not-male is sufficient to infect those around you with the cooties.

I wonder if the censors wear special protective cootie-proof clothing when going about their pixelisation? And are they working in a lab rated to contain the cooties in the event of an accident?

Are the Haredi officially down as being more worried about cooties — or sexual arousal?

If it’s the latter (as I suspect) then they are implying that Jewish men are quite likely to get horny from looking at the faces on pictures of women being rounded up by the Gestapo. They have to work hard to prevent such things. Because Jewish men are so moral.

I don’t think they’ve thought through what this sort of nonsense looks like to outsiders. No, we are not impressed by how moral they must be. They just look creepy. Real creepy. On several levels.

I don’t know anyone who made it out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Goldfinger is an historical figure to me, or should be. But I see the mother of one of the members of my congregation back in Portland behind those pixels. It’s funny, they anonymize her, which then allows my brain to personalize her.

I don’t know what to say save this is making me physically ill. I’ve been nauseated since the moment I read the OP, and it has only become worse since reading more about Bakehillah and their reasoning. I hope my old rabbi is in Israel right now – she’d kick up a fuss about this.

@noastronomer – these are the same people who think it’s OK to spit at little girls for being immodest. I suspect that your definition of reasonable and their definition of reasonable are almost entirely non-overlapping.

Is this the same paper that completely photoshopped some women out of some pictures recently?
I don’t remember exactly.
That was an Orthodox rag from memory. I’m not good at distinguishing the batty Jewish fringe, unfortunately.

I went through unconcerned (Oh, they’re preserving the dignity of the victims while condemning the Nazis and making their faces visible to shame them, that makes, well, some sense I guess) through baffled (hang on, they didn’t preserve the boy’s anonymity, in fact, his face is very clearly visible, so, wtf?), and had to read the linked article to believe that, yes, the pixelating really was being done because the person was a woman, and wimmen be temptin.

And at that point baffled breaks down and I really don’t know where I am. I’m pretty sure I’d be spitting angry if I could get my brain to believe it. Right now I’m stuck in “nah, no way did they just do that”. I mean seriously, wtf?

At first I thought that the blurring out was meant as some sort of misguided attempt to protect the victims identity (sort of like how news coverage tries to avoid naming the name of a rape victim).
But then I saw that they didn’t bother covering the face of the male victims (child in front, child in back, and a few adult males in the back who looked like they’re part of the group being herded out).

The cropped version focused your eye on the little boy, directly, whereas the uncropped allows your eye to follow the circle of the events. The uncropped photo is vastly superior.

This was their stated intent. They wanted to focus on the story of the boy. But the Haredi cannot show women in photographs, so they invented a lame excuse to try to deflect the backlash. Because erasure is completely fine when it’s traditional! /snark

Marcus Ranum @28
Apologies, I think I need more snark tags. They’re lying shitstains. They’re justifying this all after the fact because they’re a part of a hugely sexist religious sect that spits at young girls.

Related to holytape @#29, I do wonder what this kind of enforced censoring and the resultant sexualization of women in literally any situation, apparently including that one, does to the minds and sexuality of the men there.

I had to Google Haredi and the following bit from Wikipedia made me laugh:

Use of the term “ultra-Orthodox” can also be controversial,[14] and is considered pejorative…Canada’s Centre for Faith and Media, while stating that the term “sometimes… cannot be avoided”, advises journalists to

Try to avoid the term ultra-Orthodox to describe very observant Jews, partly because ultra implies extremism…As well, there is no analogue on the other end of the religious spectrum (there are no ultra-Reform Jews.)[18]

Of course there are ultra-Reform Jews – we’re called Atheists. (N.B. I’m not Jewish, but all four of my grandparents were.)

I seem to remember that the boy at the front was lucky enough to survive the war and was tracked down for his thoughts about the photograph. I think it was a BBC program about 15-20 years ago? Anybody else remember it?